Should I start doing all projects at 720p?

For run and gun projects, documentary type stuff, with no stabilizer and some lenses not having a stabilizer, I've thought about just making my movies 720p, that way I can have room to crop the 1080p footage and provide a much more stable video. If its real shaky, this combined with something like a warp stabilizer could quite literally make it look as if I have a glide cam.

I just wonder how many people notice the difference? Honestly, I can't tell the difference unless I'm zoomed in. In this case, the zooming in would be in a higher resolution, therefore not losing anything. If I zoom in or crop in 1080, I'm losing things in a different way.

If most of the footage in 1080p project is cropped for stabilization, how does that look vs the footage in 720p project not being cropped at all at the 720p point, because the 1080p footage and not conforming it to the timeline project.

I have used this method with 4k, down to 1080p and it works extremely well, but there is a bigger difference in 1080p and 4k, I don't know if there is enough difference in 720p and 1080p.

Stabilizing always requires a little (or a lot if your video is very shaky) of upscaling. If your footage is unstable and you want to retain the best possible quality when you need to stabilize it, it is indeed a good idea to edit the footage in a project with a frame size that is smaller than the frame size of the footage. If your footage is 1080p and you need to do a lot of stabilizing and/or upscaling, 720p is a good option. The FCP X stabilizer is really good, but Lock&Load is by far the most powerful video stabilizer on the market.

- Ronny

ronny courtens wrote: ... Lock&Load is by far the most powerful video stabilizer on the market. ..

.... coremelt actually offers a 20$ rebate! Time limited offer!

Well, I've been using warp stabilizer and it's extremely powerful, it's enough for me anyway, but I shoot a lot of times with lenses that don't have stabilization. I can completely rid myself of the problem by using this method.

The new Sony A7ii has in camera stabilization but I have a Sony A7R, so it's only on the lenses. I am able to keep it more steady than I was the 5D though. It doesn't weigh much.

I tend to do 720p projects. At least for things that only are intended for web. Vimeo is only 720, for example.

I have had two main reasons for this;
1) My internet connection is/was super slow, 720 files are slightly smaller.
2) It allows for zoom ins another fake camera movements in post. Sometimes if the b-cam is unmanned, you have to be wider than you'd like to make sure everything's always in frame, then you can crop it/zoom if in 720.

My only interest in 4K is so I could do the same kind of zooms/crops etc but still deliver 1080p. Now if I could only afford an O7Q for my FS700...

I certainly do all my corporate stuff and most of my TV stuff in 720p.
Just gives me more room to move and it will never be noticed by the viewer.

If I'm doing a short film, important documentary or something that I'll probably need to re-visit in the distant future then I tend to go with 1080p. There are exceptions of course but for the most part it's 720 all the way.

delirium trigger wrote: For run and gun projects, documentary type stuff, with no stabilizer and some lenses not having a stabilizer, I've thought about just making my movies 720p, that way I can have room to crop the 1080p footage and provide a much more stable video....warp stabilizer could quite literally make it look as if I have a glide cam... I've been using warp stabilizer...

In my experience on Windows, Premiere's warp stabilizer works well but is very slow. FCP X's stabilizer works very well and is much faster. I used proDAD Mercalli for years, and it was lightning fast and produced good results.

720p/60 doesn't make it smoother per se, it just reduces frame blurring which might produce better stabilization. OTOH you are giving up about 1/2 the pixels so there's less room to crop (which stabilization requires).

I haven't seen any stabilizer that reliably produces footage equal to a vest-mounted glide cam. In general we only use optically stabilized lenses for run-and-gun stuff. Even if that reduces lens options, the final product is usually better quality and requires a lot less post than trying to stabilize totally shaky footage then fix the artifacts.

Another issue on FCP X is you can't stabilize an edited multicam clip without backtracking and finding the base clip it came from and stabilizing that. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

You are correct. You have to replace the MC segment with the corresponding original media before you can apply stabilization to it. This involves two keystrokes: SHIFT+F and D.

Or, if the original media consists of short clips, you can stabilize the clip in the Angle Viewer.

But it would indeed be easier of we just could do it straight in the timeline. It's a good feature request.

- Ronny